Muscle Memory
I pump iron, only forty pounds at a time.
These are quiet, solo sessions.
Each time mirrors every other,
until I find a good rhythm
and think of someplace else with some person else.
I will flex and lift my chin
enough to satisfy the need to save face.
I don’t remember the faces, sometimes I look into them.
Mostly, I don’t.
I see through them, to the ultimate goal.
Big. Numbers.
I keep my movements standard:
calf-raises (50): 10*115lb, 40*165lb
leg press (50): 10*200lb/115˚, 10*170lb/90˚, 10*190lb/90˚, 10*200lb/90˚
Weight in every direction, 20* each:
(overhead press, hammer curl, 90˚ internal rotation, row)
The muscles remember
and bulge.
I always keep count.
The bigger the better, if I remember correctly.
This fission is something separate from bending and binding.
Pain and then profit is not what this is.
This is slow, burning, terrible, and necessary.
This is necessary to keep what I have spent so much time maintaining.
The rough start to a drunk night
brings me no rest.
Awake and unaware, I run out of the room.
All I know is the soreness
of something unexpected.
I’m sure it may feel like a long time ago
to the other half of me.
“Just a passing brush, not a stabbing pain.”
I think about it every day.
I can forgive, but the muscle remembers.
It shies away even now.
Just an exercise.
“Was I really talking in my sleep?”
And Another Thing
“If I made a personality for you, personally for you, could you adopt him?”
“So you can adopt him? Am I not here already?”
“Already I love you, already you know that.”
“You have such capacity for love, I love that you feel I should have such capacity to take in a new me for you.”
“I love that you agree so easily with me, without getting snarky.”
“I LOVE.. Let’s bring back what you said to begin with. You tell me how it sounds: ‘Would you adopt a new personality?’”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You said something like that.”
“Well sure, but it wasn’t that.”
“Okay, please tell me what you said.”
“What I actually said was: ‘You shouldn’t be so angry all the time.’”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“You hear what you want to, you remember nothing - it would do you no good to remember all the nonsense you selectively isolate.”
“I remember something you said less than a minute ago. I can remember that much.”
“I can remember something I said just as well.”
“I’m tired. Plain tired. Tired of you, me, us, all of it.”
“If you’re so tired of you, then you can see how I feel.”
“All I told you is you need to change.”
“No, that’s what I told you.”
“Who can remember.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“Who am I to you?”
“Who are you to me? Well, we’re together.”
“I’m getting tired of you. I get to be tired too.”
“Is it me you’re tired of, or is it just that you like ‘him’ better?”
“You know what, you two can leave me out of this.”
Graves & Bases
Stomachs without matter stew,
stashed in the corner of an estuary
to be alleviated amid salt and excrement.
Anything that fits can live there,
provided it knows how to swim.
Minds with no grounding
drift into the darkest clouds.
Enlighten them to fall.
Or these minds watch: peeling and shredding the earth’s crusty pigment and the water’s trembling surface to see
if new paint can wash the face off an old baseball:
that only the pitcher can restitch.
“Oh great big thrower,” the stray cat goes. “Thread the team down and make them inspect, in a red bind, every speck. No more of their landing shapes and inedible grass. Every player is in it for themselves, every head can barely string together the rest of them. Where are the instincts of these piecemeal bodies?”
The cat is tan and worldly, and not a stray at all,
but will insist, with the fence that is not so high.
With golden eyes set on the horizon -
one to see every waggling piece of flesh
on strange bones, one to see the moving air between each withered bat.
And, as it goes, the cat’s too sly to be seen.
It’s feeling chatty as the world slips from each battered mitt.
Prowling the criss-cross metal that cuts between one sport and another,
it asks, rhetorically,
“And why draw out the game?”
Chests are on fire, hearts bouncing down plastic turf,
arms abandoned in an enemy’s pocket, crotches stuck in zippers,
legs were not there to begin with,
feet are sizing up the stretch between the plates,
teeth are glued together, gums are stretching out teeth,
teeth are chipped from eating rocks,
hands are balled up, fingernails are filed down or folded,
and there’s no red string for any of them,
and the cat is silent and bored, almost saying with its flittering eyes,
“Is this all there is to it?”
Run home, dear.
Winged Soul & Whiskered Cheeks
The cat would be a zombie,
an immortal being of eighty-nine centuries.
Bouncing upon God’s knee,
we will assume these are death screams.
However even or odd the odds be,
the box is filled with bones and fur and fleas.
Pinched for too long between God’s two fingers,
a tired and wary spirit lingers.
Flamboyant birds, they fly away,
but he had chirped to me so sweetly.
Another day will pass away
until that feathered boy can meet me.
I miss him more than I can say.
His troubled mind can just complete me.
And should I go another way,
his gentle soul will never leave me -
not easily.
“Where’s paradise?” it asked from the summit.
It prowls along the mountain's edge.
It pinned the bird down and plucked the feathers from it.
It’s meowing and groaning as its skin turns green and red.
The great beast can only be swayed by some bit
of dread.
I was the one you cast aside.
I never knew I did you wrong.
When I was born, that’s when I died.
I’m in a world I don’t belong.
His burden he has made mine,
for nothing short of long.
Slanted eyes directed forward,
clever posture craning to start,
all advancements untoward,
the rotten meat fuels its little, rapid heart.
There is no more time for a bird.
All it knows are shifting bright toys and crackling seeds splitting apart.
Holding out my hand, you there made stead,
marking my features like treasures.
It was the wind by which you were led,
flippantly, stupidly, and foolish to no measure.
You from me and me of you, we both want fed.
I will eat you, featherless, at my leisure.
Just like the cracking road ahead,
you are to be tarred and weathered.
There is an all-consuming need
resting in a mewling choir.
The green paws and claws of greed
will surely land standing in fire.
If not presented with the song of a squawking, chirping plead,
does the cat thrive in a box? A hat? A cage of wire?
He only looks the same.
Every other part
has changed.
No, I don’t know that new man.
But he can’t desecrate his memory
with his new understanding.
The porous birds of paradise have fallen from the cliff.
Just thinking of their colors draining leaves me pale and stiff.
Pinching
Where am I to hide? In my house,
where I’m expected?
The wilderness - the tall grass and ganged trees -
are all processed and condensed.
The irritable hand
Stretches its own skin
Until it is white, and condensed
Callous milk
A man who does not punish themself
Will be disciplined in ways he does not control
A piece of flesh uncultured
Is marred and consumed
Or will rot away
From its own uselessness
One can lick a cactus, and come out clean
With a silver tongue
But one can swallow down the world
Piece by piece
With iron-plated insides
And yet stay hungry
There you are: a full-metal man
An empty shell
Be devoured
Or devour yourself
